Bullets & Numbering

Can anyone point me to a succinct round-up of what I need to know to understand bullets & numbering, outline numbering and the list gallery in Word 2000? I did read some of the stuff on this in the excellent Word of Law section of WoW, but found that it was rather inconclusive.

The (to me, at least) unpredictable and seemingly arbitrary behaviour of bulleted and numbered lists is by far my most frequent source of annoyance with Word. Especially, I fail to understand how Word selects one of the numbering/bulleting styles in the ListGallery and why it makes the choices it does.

Re: Bullets & Numbering

The best web site I found is www.payneconsulting.com where you'll find some tips, but, even better, you'll have a link to info about their book "Word 2000 in the Law Office." Legal offices use bullets and numbering (esp. numbering) quite a lot.

Re: Bullets & Numbering

Mike,

There seem to be two camps on how to set these up: some folks recommend doing it only and entirely via macros. And some do it manually.

I understand there are technical advantages to setting it up via macros, but personally I've never sat and down and really sussed out how they work. The advantage of doing them manually is that it's much easier (if you don't know advanced VBA) to understand what you're doing. However, when done manually, there are a few tricks you need to know in order to avoid heartache.

If you want to e-mail me off-list, I have an illustrated guide to setting up outline numbering styles manually, which I can send you - it's too large to post here, I think.

Re: Bullets & Numbering

And I fall into the macro or die camp. Email me and I will send a template that demonstrates the macros and styles you need.

The basic premise for manually controlling numbered lists is each list can be applied/controlled manually from the seven positions in the galleries. When you do this the text is formatted according to whatever the format in position #x of the list gallery says to format with (plus some local formatting just to make it tricky). If you modify say position 3 in the gallery then all the lists which use position 3 in this file (and subsequently opened files) will be affected. The formatting of a list gallery element may vary or move when you visit the dialog box which controls them (and increments the metadata list entries which cause other problems eventually). In short it is a total @#$%!^-up by Microsoft which is why it is important to use styles and macros to control them.

Re: Bullets & Numbering

I agree that the design is a %$^&-up by MS. However I avoid a lot of the problems by not attaching numbering to any of the built-in styles (use custom styles instead), and not using the default gallery listings to do things like switch lists.

If you manually build a custom outline list, linked to styles, then any time a further customization needs to be made to any level of that list, you must have the insertion point in a paragraph that is an example of Level 1 of your outline list, before going into Bullets and Numbering.

When you do this, and go to Bullets and Numbering, the correct gallery position (displaying your custom outline list) will always be highlighted, and safely available for further customization.
When done this way, the gallery position that the list is displayed at, actually doesn't matter, and the outline numbering remains stable from user to user and machine to machine (except for the rare case of levels unlinking, and needing to be relinked).

All numbering is then applied by applying the appropriate numbering styles. If a user wanted to switch from one outline list to another, admittedly they won't have the convenience of switching to a different list template in the gallery - rather they would need to reapply the different numbering styles. What's lost in convenience in this respect, is gained in stability as all the numbering is reasonably reliable.

All I can say is it really does work! (we've got 4000+ users, and millions of documents, that use numbering set up this way)

Gary

Added this PS: all of the above is not to say that the macro-driven approach is not valid - it is after the all the basis for a number of commercial numbering add-ins that obviously do work. Different strokes...

Re: Bullets & Numbering

Gary,

Is there anything on the web which might illustrate something along the lines you want? Or even something which you could post onto a free host?

I appreciate there's problems with posting large explanations or solutions- particularly if they're company confidential- but the trouble is that people will come here later looking for a solution to a similar problem, and not be able to find a solution.

It is a complex issue though, and if there's nothing out there. so be it.

Re: Bullets & Numbering

I agree wholeheartedly Gary. We also use styles and numbering in this fashion and the only problems we have run across is when the users try to <font color=red>circumvent</font color=red> using the styles that we have set up.